Energy, water, food and waste systems analyses at a nexus level is key to move towards a more sustainable development pathway. In this paper, we apply techno-economic and life cycle optimization to emphasize multiple waste-to-energy and waste-to-resources pathways, aiming to develop waste treatment and recovery capacities with the minimal economic and environment cost. A wide variety of waste categories are incorporated including wastewater (WW), municipal solid waste (MSW), agriculture waste and industrial chemical wastes, as the source of combustion through incineration, gasification or pyrolysis for combined heat and power generation, or biological treatment such as anaerobic digestion (AD) and aerobic treatment, or chemical reactions to transit to value-added products. The application demonstrates how simulation and optimization models can provide new insights in the design of sustainable value chains, with particular emphasis on whole-system analysis and integration. We will also present the collaborative work with Prof Ning Yan’s group on a suite of life cycle analysis (LCA) studies aiming to compare several novel waste-shell fractionation processes with the traditional process. The work demonstrates significant environmental and economic benefits of the waste-shell utilization methodolody developed in Yan’s lab. For example, CO2 is used as a raw material, either with concentrated urea that is recycled multiple times to reduce the total energy consumption and carbon footprint, or hydrothermal-CO2 process without using any eco-unfriendly reagent to yield chitin with comparable quality and a shorter production cycle. For 100 kg shell waste process, the traditional operation consumes 797 kWh and carbon footprint reaches 283 kg (CO2-eq), while the novel process can significantly decrease the operation energy consumption and carbon footprint by 92% and 93% respectively. Besides, ten LCA impact categories based on CML method were investigated, all of which shows that the hydrothermal-CO2 process has much less environmental impacts than the traditional and urea-CO2 processes.

Techno-economic and life cycle optimization of multiple waste-to-energy and resources pathways

255th National Meeting (2018)

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